Cisco, Google, VMware Put Big Bucks Behind Puppet Labs

A trio of tech titans -- Cisco, Google and VMware -- has made a major investment in cloud and virtualization provisioning player Puppet Labs.

Puppet Labs Tuesday said it closed $8.5 million in Series C funding, cash the company will leverage to continue to fuel growth. The funding round saw new investors including Cisco, Google Ventures and VMware, join existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures and Radar Partners. The additional $8.5 million pushes Puppet Labs to a total of $15.75 million raised.

While Puppet Labs bills itself as an IT automation software provider for system administrators, the company has recently put a good deal of weight behind its cloud management capabilities. In September, Puppet Labs launched Puppet Enterprise 2.0 which added cloud provisioning, change monitoring and management orchestration from a single console. Puppet Enterprise 2.0 lets users provision VMware and Amazon EC2 instances to migrate apps across public and private clouds and also configure and manage those instances. Puppet Enterprise 2.0 is the second iteration of Puppet's first commercial product, which it launched in January.

Puppet Labs now boasts more than 250 customers, including Citrix, Constant Contact, Disney, NYSE, Oracle/Sun, Twitter and Zynga, plus a host of others. Puppet Labs' partner ecosystem has also continued to grow, with integrations now available with Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Eucalyptus Systems, OpenStack, RightScale, VMware, Zenoss and others.

"As trends go, while at times it's difficult to separate reality from hype, it's clear that virtualization and cloud computing are disrupting our industry at every layer in the stack," Kanies wrote in a blog post announcing the funding round. "Amidst this chaos, VMware has carved-out impressive leadership in virtualization and private cloud computing. And Google, in order to scale their businesses to meet exponentially growing demand, pioneered many of the concepts of cloud computing that are just now being commercialized for the broader market. Such partners provide us with an incredibly powerful crystal ball into the dynamics and impact of these trends."

According to Kanies, said the company is "doubling down" on design and the $8.5 million investment will help fuel that growth. Puppet Labs also plans to push integration with partners' products.

"In particular, we will invest more in designing products that allows our users to move faster, with more information, and across a wider selection of technologies than ever before, as it's clear is necessary to take full advantage of the disruptions of virtualization and cloud computing," Kanies wrote.

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